by William Skink

For expressing my concern about a world war breaking out and disruptions in our food supply if something major occurs, a new label was used to mock my concerns: drama lizard.

Here is the full comment from Pete Talbot (link):

World War III! No food on the shelves! All is lost! So says the drama lizard. No point in trying to change the system. Time to buy a handgun and hunker down.

And a Clinton presidency is scarier than Chief Executive Trump? The guy wants to “hit people in the face so hard,” and says “the fact is that we need unpredictability” when it comes to nuclear weapons, and “women who seek abortions should be punished … ”

Anyway, I’ll keep plugging away with a good number of other folks to pull the party to the left. I don’t know any other way, realistically, of bringing about progressive change.

Apparently progressive sadomasochists who revel in the humiliating loss delivered by the DNC can’t imagine a scenario in which their pathologically lying president (who has referred to Putin as Hitler and questioned whether he has a soul) provokes nuclear armageddon. Luckily not everyone has stunted imaginations. For those folks, I recommend reading John Pilger’s latest article, Silencing America as it prepares for war. From the link:

The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for the resilience of an enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of the members of the United Nations have felt Washington’s boot, overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal – Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

The breathtaking record of perfidy is so mutated in the public mind, wrote the late Harold Pinter, that it “never happened …Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. It didn’t matter… “. Pinter expressed a mock admiration for what he called “a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Hypnosis is a better explanation for what Democrats seem to experience as they do their best to avoid the cognitive dissonance that occurs when reality intrudes and the hypnosis doesn’t work. How else to understand this comment from Talbot:

” … the only thing your party has to motivate voters is fear this election cycle,” says lizard. Did you not watch any of the Republican convention? Crime, Negroes, Mexicans, Muslims — time to circle the wagons.

The Democratic message was uplifting in comparison, except for the real fear that a madman like Trump could become president.

Instead of taking the word of a victim of DNC hypnosis, let’s actually take a look at the uplifting warmongering the Democrats offered in contrast to the orange demon spawn that has singlehandedly short-circuited the brain functioning of Democrats:

In Philadelphia, the former Special Presidential Envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS, retired Gen. John Allen, delivered a bombastic lecture in which he endorsed Hillary Clinton on the grounds that she alone was capable of opposing tyranny and evil via military interventions around the world.

“With Hillary Clinton as our commander-in-chief,” he shouted in language that doubtless warmed the hearts of interventionists of both major parties, “the United States will continue to be that indispensable, transformational power in the world.” Not only that, but the Pentagon would be able to relax, knowing that the military-industrial complex would never have to pinch pennies: “Our armed forces will be stronger. They will have the finest weapons, the greatest equipment.”

Amazingly, such balls-out hawkishness, delivered loudly at the highest-decibel level possible, garnered relatively little in the way of commentary or protest except in the Wells Fargo Arena itself. Anti-war activists started chants of “No More Wars,” but were quickly muffled by other attendees—and Allen himself from the podium—counter-chanting “USA! USA! USA!” (fearing pro-Bernie Sanders protests, the DNC had actually handed out directions to Clinton delegates on how to silence commotion).

As an antidote to this jingoistic American exceptionlism, here is more from Pilger:

The election of Trump or Clinton is the old illusion of choice that is no choice: two sides of the same coin. In scapegoating minorities and promising to “make America great again”, Trump is a far right-wing domestic populist; yet the danger of Clinton may be more lethal for the world.

“Only Donald Trump has said anything meaningful and critical of US foreign policy,” wrote Stephen Cohen, emeritus professor of Russian History at Princeton and NYU, one of the few Russia experts in the United States to speak out about the risk of war.

In a radio broadcast, Cohen referred to critical questions Trump alone had raised. Among them: why is the United States “everywhere on the globe”? What is NATO’s true mission? Why does the US always pursue regime change in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine? Why does Washington treat Russia and Vladimir Putin as an enemy?

The hysteria in the liberal media over Trump serves an illusion of “free and open debate” and “democracy at work”. His views on immigrants and Muslims are grotesque, yet the deporter-in-chief of vulnerable people from America is not Trump but Obama, whose betrayal of people of colour is his legacy: such as the warehousing of a mostly black prison population, now more numerous than Stalin’s gulag.

This presidential campaign may not be about populism but American liberalism, an ideology that sees itself as modern and therefore superior and the one true way. Those on its right wing bear a likeness to 19th century Christian imperialists, with a God-given duty to convert or co-opt or conquer.

My emphasis, in order to break the hypnosis: yet the danger of Clinton may be more lethal to the world. And the rest of the quote is, imho, right on, especially the part about American liberalism seeing itself as modern and superior and the one true way. That belief reminds me of the Vox article regarding the smug style of American liberalism:

Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Financial incentive compounded this tendency — there is money, after all, in reassuring the bitter. Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style. It began in humor, and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that its opponents were, before anything else, stupid. The smug liberal found relief in ridiculing them.

The internet only made it worse. Today, a liberal who finds himself troubled by the currents of contemporary political life need look no further than his Facebook newsfeed to find the explanation:

Study finds Daily Show viewers more informed than viewers of Fox News.

They’re beating CNN watchers too.

NPR listeners are best informed of all. He likes that.

You’re better off watching nothing than watching Fox. He likes that even more.

The good news doesn’t stop.

Liberals aren’t just better informed. They’re smarter.

They’ve got better grammar. They know more words.

Smart kids grow up to be liberals, while conservatives reason like drunks.

Liberals are better able to process new information; they’re less biased like that. They’ve got different brains. Better ones. Why? Evolution. They’ve got better brains, top-notch amygdalae, science finds.

The smug style created a feedback loop. If the trouble with conservatives was ignorance, then the liberal impulse was to correct it. When such corrections failed, disdain followed after it.

This important and accurate description of liberal smugness is helpful in understanding our current political predicament.